Ubisoft Dev: Piracy To Blame For Lack Of "I Am Alive" On The PC

Ubisoft hates it when pirates plunder the company’s gaming wares online. They’ve been at the forefront of the DRM battle, and by that, we mean they’ve been forcing DRM-ridden content down PC gamers’ throats left and right. It gets worse: Ubisoft won't even be publishing its upcoming “I Am Alive” on the PC due to piracy concerns. Disappointed PC players have been vocal in their displeasure, but all the “bitching” doesn't change the facts, creative director Stanislas Mettra says.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that PC gamers are bitching about there being no version for them,” Mettra told IncGamers. “But are these people just making noise just because there’s no version or because it’s a game they actually want to play? Would they buy it if we made it?”

That’s a real concern for the company, Mettra explained: if Ubisoft paid a team of 12 developers to port the game over to the PC, the game would have to sell in excess of 50,000 copies in order to make the effort financially viable for Ubisoft. Mettra then insinuated that for all their talk, most PC gamers are – you guessed it – filthy pirates who wouldn’t actually buy the game, anyways. “It’s hard because there’s so much piracy and so few people are paying for PC games,” he said.

After some negative feedback to the article, Mettra sent IncGamers a follow-up email explaining his position further: “I would really love to see a PC build of the game and I don’t think I meant to say ‘the game won't happen on PC’… What I meant is that the PC version did not happen yet. But we are still working to see the feasibility of it, which is not necessarily simple.” Mettra, who isn’t a native English speaker, said that communication issues may have been part of the reason the message came across the way it did.